


When You're Cool

by thefoxandtherose



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Book Omens, Book Verse, Character Study, Crowley is too cool for school, Gen, Historical Fashion, I googled men's fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries for days and then just gave up, M/M, You're Welcome, but honestly so is Aziraphale, in his own way, or my poor attempts at it, soft musings on the lives of immortals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:35:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24783217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefoxandtherose/pseuds/thefoxandtherose
Summary: Cool has been Crowley’s brand for centuries. Millenia even.But fashions change over time, and the memories of a demon do not.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	When You're Cool

**Author's Note:**

> I have loved these two since 2005, but haven't ever posted anything I've written about them. I hope you enjoy it.

-

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. - Oscar Wilde

-

Fashion was fickle.

Crowley knew this. Cool had been his brand for millennia, for ages before the word was ever spoken. Before blogs, before fashion magazines, before annual color trends. Before writing, for that matter. From the first moment that humanity had raised its eyes to look at each other, and that potent mixture of admiration and envy had flooded their systems, a cocktail of desire and disdain and a healthy splash of inadequacy that had set them thrumming along experiencing that early precursor that would someday evolve into fully blown cool … Crowley had been there. 

He was, he thought, with a few notable lapses [1] , exceptionally good at it. 

It worked like this: cool followed a bell curve, a gentle rising and falling. Something was unique, then it was up and coming, then trending, then fashionable, and then it crested the curve and began a slow descent into mainstream, then common, then passe - and eventually, once it had been entirely abandoned by everyone with any concern for that sort of thing, untouchably and cringe-inducingly _out_ .[2]

Crowley rode the curve, eternally right on the leading edge of cool. Like a day trader, jumping in on trends on the rise, leaping to the next thing before the stocks could plummet, he had cool down to a science. 

There was, of course, a catch. 

Humans, by nature of their short lifespans, had to create themselves afresh each generation - pushing through the old, clearing away their cultural inheritance, to differentiate themselves from their parents. New slang for their new voices, new fashions for their new bodies, new instruments for their new and eager hands. Again and again, they drew up the next sets of rules to divide the ranks, to self-categorize; decade after decade, they took up their spades and began digging the trenches of a new generation gap. They couldn’t help it - it was how each new wave of humanity came to know itself.

For a human, anything that had happened before their own time they saw through the dimming, obfuscating lens of an earlier generation’s experience, a haze of faded photographs. They struggled to empathize with their parents, their grandparents: middle-aged mothers, flushed and adamant, hovering over kitchen counters strewn with discolored old photographs, insisting over the loud laughter of their teenage daughters that this WAS cool, this _WAS_ , at the time. Watching themselves slide into cultural irrelevance while the next generation crested the summit. 

Their idea of cool was forged early, while they were still fresh from the crucible of youth. It held fast, on some level, branded in their minds - and though they´d often live long enough to see those early fashions fall out of style, they never forgot what it felt like to taste cool for the first time.

Crowley, of course, wasn’t human. He could purge his closet, cut his hair, change his accent, redecorate his flat, but he couldn’t change what he was. Or what he had been.

Crowley had personally lived through every stage of human culture. Every bizarre trend, every wild human fashion, every museum-grade remnant of a past age - he had experienced them in their prime, un-ironically, in full and glorious color. He remembered them that way, without the dimming effects of time. 

Crowley remembered.

He remembered beautiful young men and women stumbling through the streets in arrow collar shirts and cloche hats, laughing and high on pinches of powder kept tucked away in tiny silver cases, while the wet cobblestones threw moonlight back up onto their shining faces. 

He remembers the scent of polished mahogany and white wig powder, the sweltering heat of crowded ballrooms and the momentary hush and subsequent low murmur of voices as dozens of eyes slid over the latest arrival, an immaculate construction of embroidered silks and flashing buttons and elaborately tied cravats. 

He remembers paper-walled rooms, whispering voices rising above the buzz of the cicadas as the women of the court gasped and sighed at a particularly beautiful new poem, their twelve-layer robes unfolding from their pale necks like flower petals as they read, framing their pale faces, their blackened teeth.

It had been beautiful, he remembers, the painted bloom of crimson lips, their coal-dark teeth hidden demurely in their dark mouths when they spoke, when they smiled. 

People couldn’t fathom that, now, in an era of bleaches and whitening strips. But it had been beautiful.

And Crowley remembers it as it was.

Mutton sleeves and kohl eye makeup, bell bottoms and waterbeds and codpieces - all of them had had their moment: fascinating and new, desirable and desired, adorning the young, the beautiful, the rich. Cool by association, and tossed away as soon as they could be replaced by the next rising trend.

He remembered every age. 

He remembered Aziraphale in every age.

He’d seen him draped in Tyrian purple, frowning a bit disdainfully as a servant offered him a platter of peacock’s tongues.

He'd seen him glittering and resplendent in the French court, all watered satins and shining buckles, his eyes brightening when he spotted Crowley across the room.

He had seen Aziraphale step out of the tailors in that damned coat, nearly 200 years ago now, fairly glowing with delight and drawing envious glances from across the busy London street. 

Crowley had caught him out, once, napping in the sun outside of Oxford in a boater hat, his jacket tossed aside, his sleeves rolled up and forearms glistening in the afternoon heat, the spots of blinding sunlight dancing on the surface of the river. He had called out to him, thrown himself down on the grass and slung a cheeky arm around his shoulder and called him Dear Boy, which had been the fashion among the rich and lazy young aristocrats at the time, and Aziraphale had frowned at him, but played along, and they'd lingered there watching the punters until sundown.

The first time he's heard Aziraphale level the phrase at him had been a full 40 years later, when it was well and truly out of fashion, a term used only by old men in their smoking jackets at their exclusive dinner clubs, but Crowley had been thrown back on that riverbank, flushed with the summer sun, color high on his cheeks. Aziraphale had noticed, and he'd smiled, and he'd not stopped saying it since.

Crowley had seen him in cassocks and togas, pumpkin breeches and silk brocade and the coarse linen tunics of their early days, and it was always like that. Aziraphale always made it feel like yesterday. 

When Crowley looked at him now, he knew what the humans saw. A hodgepodge of assorted styles and fashions from past decades, faded and worn, the dusty treasures and dwindling remembrances of an old man, their brightness used up through the passing of time. An old man worrying away the inscription of an ancient pocket watch. A faded, cluttered, antique shop of a man, with his obscure little turns of phrase, fit to be pitied, or mocked, depending on the human doing the observing. 

What Crowley saw, though he's never admitted it, though he won't admit it, not until he's still in the silent and sacred moments they'll come to share after the storm has passed, is much closer to what Aziraphale himself sees. A magpie collection of the best and brightest moments in human history, a kaleidoscope of beautiful things, wrapped in the glowing scents and sounds of the moment, captured forever and pinned down in the unfading memories of the immortals. 

Eternally cherished, and beautiful beyond the changing tides of fashion.

**Author's Note:**

> 1He doesn’t want to talk about the window decals, ok? Moving on. [return to text]
> 
> 2Sometimes the cycle took decades, sometimes it was a flash in the pan, here and gone in a month - but the cycle didn’t change. It’s worth noting that, yes, eventually fashions did cycle back - but this was never until they had fully passed into antiquity, until they'd been dead for long enough that nobody under 25 remembered them. Then and only then could they be "rediscovered" by a new generation and become cool again, much to the chagrin of parents and grandparents who had relegated them to the graveyard of the untouchably uncool.
> 
> This cycle held true for everything, including - though the author hates to admit it - Crowley’s beloved Bentley. There had been a few awkward decades, between its birth as an envy-inducing dream machine and its ultimate designation as an priceless classic, when it had been decidedly and distinctly outdated and uncool. Crowley had lovingly tucked it away in a high-end parking garage during these difficult adolescent years, visiting it and whispering gentle encouragements, running his hand over the flawless paint job and re-conditioning the leather seats, and somewhere in the early 1960s it had re-emerged as the excruciatingly cool vintage model that we know and love, flawlessly preserved and ready to terrorize the streets of London.[return to text]


End file.
